Staff MemberPremium Supporter

The first basic issue is that when you expanded the d drive you moved the start position and that’s where windows looks to boot the drive from… had you taken the extra space from the other side i.e. behind instead of in front then there won’t be an issue.

You can and perhaps should format the entire drive when the time comes to restore it but as you only have windows (no Linux) you could also just let the advance boot manager recover the image… the odds are good because the drive isn’t really damaged per-say you just moved the start location back a bit and that is a fairly easy thing for windows to recover from assuming something more drastic doesn’t happen between now and whenever this needs to be done.

p.s. remember that Windows 10 doesn’t go live until late next year and that’s assuming it’s on time which ime is a big if when talking about microsoft products… I’d consider a new hdd if space is becoming an issue now.

Microsoft Community Contributor

Thanks for the information. The problem is that most of my free space was on the Windows 8 drive, because I never put any of my data or much of my software on it but it was allotted 500 Gigabytes of disk space.

I just finished backing up all of the data on Drive drive D:\ all my games and Windows 10 software to one of my external drives.

How about this...

I remove all the partitions, format the drive, repartition it with 200 Gigs for Windows 8 and 800 Gigs for Drive D:\ and then I can restore all my software to Drive D:\ and restore Windows to what it now G:\ using my image backup?

Does that sound like a logical way to do it, and I'll get my space where I want it and have Windows 8 loading again?

One more question, will my System Image restore be affected by the fact that the drive I'm restoring to is smaller than the one it was on when I made it?

Staff MemberPremium Supporter

This is a case of, take the time to plan the system before you format makes life easy later.

1. Yes that is what I would do i.e. re-install the smaller (100g is plenty ime) windows 8 image and then look at the system again.

2. I use Acronis as you probably know and it can put the image onto a smaller drive because the windows 8 image (I assume) has a lot of blank space so that is possible but I also recall you like a 3rd party backup system that I’m not familiar with… a re-install of 8 may end up being the answer in your case.

Ime The only two things that muck up image recovery software is windows recovery drives because they are locked by default and windows page allocation. Copying or reimaging a drive with windows recovery will fail and a drive with windows page system on it will be much slower than normal (I remove the page until the image is done then put it back)… multiple copies of windows can share the same page drive without issue because the format hasn’t changed.

Microsoft Community Contributor

Actually my Windows image file takes 212 Gigabytes of disk space uncompressed, so I'll have to make the partition at least 250 Gigs.

I can remove stuff from it after it's reinstalled but the image is what it is.

I have 2 of them, one made with Paragon and one made with EaseUS TODO Backup.

If I have to I also have the recovery USB drive that came with my computer which would put it back to it's original state. But I'd rather recover it as it is now.

I've used both of them and they work.

I've backed up Windows 10 14 times so far, (actually 13 but I skipped that number. LOL) and I've restored it 5 times. If I mess anything up I just restore to before I did it instead of trying to fix it.

Well, I'm not going to do it right now since everything is going fine and I have all my software installed in Windows 10 now, even my Adobe stuff like Indesign CS4, Photoshop, and Premiere.

None of my data is on the drive that I messed up, only my games, Windows 8 and my Widows 10 software is on that drive. All of which can just be copied back to the drive after I format and partition it.

So I guess,

Step one, remove partitions.

Step two, format the drive.

Step three. repartition the drive the way I want it.

Step four. Recover my Windows 8 image to the first partition which will be drive G:\ as it is now. It will become C:\ when I boot into it.

I can have multiple shots at it if I have to since nothing else will be on the drive.

Step Five. Once I see that I can boot into Windows 8 I can copy all of my game installs, and back to the second partition, Which will remain Drive D:\ so that Windows 10 and 8 will see the stuff the same address they do now.

Staff MemberPremium Supporter

Step Five. Once I see that I can boot into Windows 8 I can copy all of my game installs, and back to the second partition, Which will remain Drive D:\ so that Windows 10 and 8 will see the stuff the same address they do now.

Does that sound right?

Click to expand...

Should be fine yes but if step 5 has an boot issue, run the windows boot manager (advanced) to scan for the bootable image... Ime windows 8 is easy to recover and that should fix it unless the hdd itself is damaged.